Doctor Who: Cybermen are back but they desperately need a scary outing in season 8

Peter Capaldi and Michelle Gomez face the Cybermen in Doctor who season 8 (Picture: BBC)

The latest teaser is in from Cardiff where the eighth season of Doctor Who is being recorded and we’ve got another confirmed monster: the Cybermen are back. And more menacingly they’re back on Earth to do battle with the Doctor.

WARNING: Possible spoilers ahead

And in the location pics from Cardiff, there’s plenty to like. And it’s so much more than just Cybermen.

Michelle Gomez is there, as announced by the BBC, dressed in some sort of Victorian or Edwardian garb bearing a distinct resemblance to Mary Poppins.

But she’s also got some tech device, and even looks like she might be taking a selfie with the Doctor. Gomez plays the bizarrely titled Gatekeeper of the Netherspace.

Cybermen are back to face the new Doctor played by Peter Capaldi and some old friends (Picture: Tom Martin/Wales News Service)

Fangirl Osgood has also changed her attire, presumably in response to her recent encounter with three Doctors Who in the 50th anniversary special The Day of the Doctor. Gone is the fourth Doctor scarf now she’s wearing a bow tie and sand shoes.

And a vintage Cyberman head was also spotted. We wonder what that’s all about. I think I recall a cyber head of a similar vintage in a glass case in the Under Gallery?

It’s always good to see a returning baddie, especially one so steeped in Who heritage as the Cybermen. They first encountered the Doctor in 1966, on the moon, right at the end of first Doctor William Hartnell’s time in the Tardis and they’ve been coming back for more ever since.

Just who is the Gatekeeper? (Picture: BBC)

But recently they’ve been rather bit-partish baddies making cameos as part of alien armadas. Even Neil Gaiman’s Nightmare in Silver, with Cybermen as the main draw, was a bit of a letdown.

At their best, the Cybermen have the qualities to be more menacing than the Daleks with their urge to assimilate humans with an upgrade.

Perhaps not since they occupied Torchwood Tower in Doomsday have the Cybermen had a genuinely scary story. And even then they were doing battle with the Daleks themselves.

The terror of the Cybermen is their superiority. They genuinely believe themselves to be perfect and therefore every other humanoid lifeform needs to be elevated to their own standard.

Its means that they are neither cruel or blood thirsty for their own sakes. But rather they are applying their logical efficiency to the problem in hand: the base nature of the unupgraded human.

The Cybermen only had a cameo in the Christmas special (Picture: BBC/Adrian Rogers)